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Overview

In a rollicking black comedy about terrorism, war, and conjugal strife, the author whom Salon calls "a writer of chameleonic fluency" revisits some peculiar episodes in current American history.

Joyce and Marshall Harriman are struggling to divorce each other while sharing a cramped, hateful Brooklyn apartment with their two small children. One late-summer morning, Joyce departs for Newark Airport to catch a flight to San Francisco, and Marshall goes to his office in the World Trade Center. She misses her flight, and he's late for work, but on that grim day, in a devastated city, among millions seized by fear and grief, each thinks the other's dead and each is secretly, shamefully, gloriously happy.

Opening with a swift kick to our national piety, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country follows Joyce and Marshall as they swallow their mutual disappointment, their divorce conflict intensifies, and they suffer, in unexpectedly personal ways, the many strange ravages that beset America in the first years of the Bush administration. Joyce suspects Marshall has sent an anthrax-laced envelope to her office. Marshall taps her phone and studies plans for constructing a suicide bomb. The stock market crash and the war in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and the clash of civilizations: all become marital battlefields. Concluding with the liberation of Iraq, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country astonishingly lampoons how our nation's public calamities have encroached upon our most intimate private terrors. It firmly establishes Ken Kalfus as one of the most daring and inventive writers at work today.

Product Details

About the Author

ken kalfus is the author of a novel, The Commissariat of Enlightenment, and the short story collections Thirst, which won the Salon Book Award, and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Hometown:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Date of Birth:

April 9, 1954

Place of Birth:

Bronx, New York

Education:

The New School for Social Research, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University

Kalfus’s daring, intelligent exploration of animosity in its various forms (spousal and familial, political and religious) is a novelistic evocation of global despair: "This was a world of heedless materialism, impiety, baseness and divorce. Sense was not made, this was jihad. Yet in its final pages, the novel pulls a twist, moving into a surreal account of American success in Iraq and the dawning of democracy in the Middle East. The dream of a happy marriage may, Kalfus seems to suggest, be equally far-fetched as the political fantasy of a world made better by war. The New York Times

Sylvia Brownrigg

Marriage as metaphor for larger conflict is scarcely new, but Ken Kalfus has put a new and singularly imaginative twist on it. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country -- the title comes from Oliver Goldsmith: "There is a disorder peculiar to the country, which every season makes strange ravages among them" -- is a dark comedy with serious things to say about the difficult, unsettling times in which we live. Occasionally, it is laugh-out-loud funny, especially a long set piece centered on Joyce's sister's interfaith marriage ("Joyce sensed that she was dining at a banquet with two clans forced by hard circumstance to accommodate each other's interests, in peril of being massacred after the first martini"), but it is also about "a world of heedless materialism, impiety, baseness, and divorce," a world in which "sense was not made, this was jihad: the unconnected parts of the world had been brought together and made just ." The Washington Post

Jonathan Yardley

It's a familiar New York story: Joyce and Marshall Harriman's divorce battle escalates from a skirmish to a full-fledged territorial conflict, as both sue for custody of their coveted Brooklyn Heights co-op, and consequently they must both continue to inhabit it-along with their two small children, "their divorce's civilian casualties." Minor acts of domestic terrorism have become an unavoidable part of their daily lives, so when September 11 happens, neither is immediately very jarred. In fact, each thinks the other dead, and celebrates. Far from putting things into perspective, the tragedy and aftermath become a queasily hilarious counterpoint to the ongoing war to divide Joyce and Marshall's assets. Their pettiness reaches continuously lower depths - spying, psychological warfare and even anthrax comes into play. Joyce seduces Marshall's best friend, and Marshall sabotages Joyce's sister's wedding. The Harrimans enact the country's problems on their pathetically personal scale, but the novel miraculously manages to avoid patness or bombast. As in Jay McInerney's recent The Good Life, Kalfus puts 9/11 up against the steel-plated narcissism of New Yorkers-with very different, and very funny, results. (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Even with the horror of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, Joyce, thinking her husband dead, experiences a moment of glee. Similarly, with Joyce scheduled to fly to San Francisco that morning, when Marshall hears that the plane she was supposed to have boarded crashed into the Pentagon, he, too, is initially hopeful. Thus begins book reviewer and journalist Kalfus's (The Commissariat of Enlightenment) black comedy of post-9/11 New York, intensified by the parallel issues of divorce and terrorism. After the attacks, Joyce's office receives a letter containing white powder, while Marshall relives his traumatic escape from the Trade Center pavilion. This heightening of tensions corresponds to a heightening of the divorce wars as Joyce sleeps with Marshall's best friend and Marshall sabotages Joyce's sister's wedding. As the world adjusts to the new state of being, Joyce and Marshall also adjust, eventually finalizing their divorce. Kalfus places the events of the year following 9/11 in perspective, and it is the reflections on this period with the benefit of years of hindsight that make this novel with a twist ending such an appealing read. Recommended.-Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. Syst., Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The fallout from 9/11 casts a pall over an already moribund marriage in Kalfus's second novel (following his terrific The Commissariat of Enlightenment, 2003). When NYC working mom Joyce Harriman hears the bad news about the World Trade Center, she instantly fantasizes that her husband Marshall (who works there) is among the dead. In fact, he walks out alive, and back into a contentious detente in which the battling spouses coexist angrily in the comfy apartment neither wants to give up, tiptoeing around the needs of their demanding, borderline-"difficult" young children Viola and Victor. Kalfus deftly charts the unraveling pair's separate experiences of resentment, loneliness, pursuit of replacement love (or at least sex) in assorted wrong places and the gradual adjustment to their irreparable incompatibility. Bravura sequences include Joyce's rather sad and pathetic seduction of a longtime friend's unhappy husband, Marshall's amusingly intricate demolition of his sister-in-law's wedding and-in an ingeniously contrived scenario that nevertheless doesn't quite work-Marshall's failed attempt to dignify his despair and frustration by becoming a suicide bomber. Both the strength and the weakness of this clever novel in fact inhere in the structure of parallels Kalfus draws between the Harrimans' escalating "war" and the embattled Middle East, beyond the terrorist bombings here at home, through the U.S. invasion of Iraq and into a fantasized alternative future that slyly mocks America's-and the Harrimans'-naive idealism. Both Joyce and Marshall are sharply drawn characters, and Kalfus makes us feel their pain even when both are indulging their most infuriating traits (her quick resort totemper tantrums, his tendency to hatch overly elaborate plans that collapse under their own weight). An interesting departure from Kalfus's Slavic-inflected earlier fiction (including PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, 1999). Astringent, accomplished black comedy.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Disorder Peculiar to the Country 3.3 out of 5based on
0 ratings.
11 reviews.

Guest

More than 1 year ago

Behind the backdrop of the terror of 9/11 the author creates a symbolic look at what we do to each other through the messy and often 'terroristic' divorce of two New Yorkers. Woven in a web of personal (the divorce) and current event (9/ll) details. A masterpiece.

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It was incredible how this author took entwined a bitter divorce with current events.

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